[argyllcms] Re: Printer: CMYK or CcMmYK or ...

Hi Geert,

Gamut: It depends on the additional colours the printer has.

The benefit of CcMmYKk is the possibility to smoothen renditions by
building them out of two separate inks. That does not enlarge the gamut boundaries but you get more printable colours inside the boundaries (theoretically). If this was a larger gamut depends on the definition of gamut you take into account. 

If you add separate inks for secondaries (typically R,G,B and/or orange)
you are able to enlarge the gamut boundaries.
Coming to profiling (not calibrating) these devices you normally use the printer driver 
that is provided by the vendor.
This printer driver makes the separation from the incoming CMYK (or RGB depending on the driver) 
data into the actual installed inks.
So it depends on the driver what kind of profile you need. Assuming you use the vendors driver (which is the case if you don't use a separate RIP) a CMYK (or RGB) profile won't limit the gamut. 

Kind regards

Claas

Am 21.02.2009 um 14:35 schrieb Geert Janssens:


Hi,
A more general question on printers: if you look at the wide range of printer models these days, you find printers with 4 colors (CMYK), 6 colors (CcMmYk) 
or even 8 or more colors (???).
At the same time, all of these models claim to be "photo" printers. So I start to wonder about the value of more than 4 basic colors. Do these 6- color or 8- 
color printers really have a larger gamut than the 4-color versions ?
And also, suppose i use argyllcms to profile these printers. As far as I 
understand argyll only profiles CMYK (4 primaries) and not 6 or more
primaries. I am told that if the printer is "well behaved", this is no
problem. But would I then still have any benifit from the additional color cartridges ? I mean, if more than 4 primaries would potentially give me a larger gamut (my first question), would the fact that argyll only works with 4 
primaries not be the limiting factor in the output chain ?

I hope I make some sense here...

Thanks,

Geert

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